Saturday, July 26, 2014

You can connect a number of devices to pfSense 2.0 using IPsec, most notably Android (Phones and Tablets) and iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, etc) devices but anything that is capable of IPsec will typically work.
This document covers the most common setup for mobile devices, which is IPsec using Xauth and a mutual Pre-Shared Key.
This setup has been tested and working on Android 2.3.3 and iOS 4.3.5. Others may work as well, including the actual software Cisco client.

By default iOS will tunnel all traffic over the VPN, including traffic going to the Internet. If you are unable to access Internet sites once connected, you may need to push a DNS server to the client for it to use, such as the LAN IP address of your firewall if you have the DNS forwarder enabled, or a public DNS server such as 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4.
The reason for the above is that your 3G provider is likely giving your mobile devices DNS servers that are only accessible from their network. Once you connect to the VPN the DNS servers are now being accessed via the VPN instead of the 3G network, and the queries are likely to be dropped. Supplying a local/public DNS server will work around that.